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Day 42: A new film camera

I know it’s been several days been posting, but rest assured, I have not fallen behind in my mission nor have I forgotten about you, my small but faithful audience.

The reason for the huge gap in weekend publishing is because I was on a fun but hella swamped weekend trip to the Bay Area (a.k.a. home). Besides hanging with some old friends in various parts of San Francisco and squeezing in family time with my mom, I also went in for a meeting with SuitX, a company developing this amazing robotic exoskeleton meant to help mobility-impaired individuals like myself stand and walk on a daily basis, unlike most exoskeletons, which are restricted to rehab use only.

I don’t have video of me standing and walking in their particular device, so here’s a video of me walking in one of those rehab exoskeletons instead. Pretty cool stuff:

As crazy packed as this trip was, I didn’t want to get behind on my creation goals at all. And I promise I didn’t.

Remember that new photo venture I mentioned a few posts back? To recap, I’d mentioned that I’d ordered and was waiting on a new photo toy to arrive in the mail.

Well, it finally came:

I stumbled upon this by accident/ADD while I was browsing around eBay for some used clarinets. I definitely have an interest in photography, but didn’t know much about film photography besides my dad’s old Nikon SLR, which I’d dropped and destroyed the lens of back when I was a kid, and the occasional eye roll when passing by Lomography stores and their dinky toy cams at Urban Outfitters.

I guess you could say no one was more surprised than me when I decided to spring for this guy, despite my misgivings about being too into vintage craze. But I figured hey, old cameras are cheap (this one was $35), they look cool, and studying the ancestors of modern photography had to be educational. I also figured having limited exposures (film) to work with would make me pay more attention to getting the right shot the first time, not wildly clicking away until a cool moment happens to cross paths with my lens.

Since I’d cracked the zoom lens for my 60D anyway, I took the new Pentax and a SMC Pentax-M 35-70mm f/2.8-3.5 lens ($80), as well as three rolls of 35mm film, on the trip instead, snapping away at downtown SF sites and some local farmer’s markets.

I’ve yet to finish the entire third roll of film. But rest assured, once that’s done, I’m sending my film in for development, the scans from which I’ll then post here, backdated. If you like that kind of thing (film photography, that is), please stay tuned.